Thursday, January 10, 2013

In Radical Chic and Mau Mauing the Flak Catchers Tom Wolfe described the 1960 ritual dance between radicals and the bureaucracy in San Francisco, where local groups of militant climate change denialists descend upon the Met Office with FOIA letters, which, in its appointed role, sits there and takes them seriously. Everyone goes out for a drink or the chemical of their choice afterwards.

This article contains a series of factual inaccuracies about the Met Office and its science, as outlined below.

Firstly, he claims the Met Office failed to predict snow in 2010, but
our 5-day forecasts accurately forecast 12 out of 13 snowfall events – as you can see in this article. In addition the Press Complaints Commission has
also already addressed this fallacy with the Daily Telegraph in
February of last year. As a result the newspaper published a
clarification that highlighted that “the Met Office did warn the public of last winter’s [2010/11] cold weather from early November 2010.”

Mr Delingpole also says we failed to predict flooding in November
last year. Once again, our 5-day forecasts gave accurate guidance and
warnings throughout the period. In just one example of feedback the Met
Office has received for highly accurate forecasting and guidance
throughout 2012, Assistant Chief Constable Paul Netherton, Chair for the
Local Resilience Forum for Devon, Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly
(which was one of the areas most affected by flooding in November),
said: “[I] would like to formally thank and recognise the hard work
of the Met Office over the past week. The information you provided was
invaluable and enabled the responders in Devon, Cornwall and the Isles
of Scilly to prepare and respond effectively to assist our communities.”

Mr Delingpole then inaccurately states that the Met Office has
conceded ‘there is no evidence that ‘global warming’ is happening’. We
have not said this at any point.
In fact, we explicitly say this was not the case in an article, posted on the home page of
our website and widely circulated, which was written in response to
articles about updates to our decadal forecast. Professor Julia Slingo,
Met Office Chief Scientist, has also provided a more in depth feature on
‘Decadal Forecasting – What is it and what does it tell us?’.

Further on in the print version of the article (although amended
online), Mr Delingpole says “According to the Met, Britain is apparently
experiencing more rain by volume and intensity than at any time since
records began.” Although he is right in saying the Met Office has published preliminary observations which
show an increase in the intensity and volume of rain, we are clear that
this relates to a period from 1960 onwards – not ‘since records began’
as he claims.

There are, of course comments which tend to be less constrained by the niceties of government agencies and so far (early days) support the met office. Here is a pungent one from etonmess

Amazed to see it has been 15 seconds and there aren’t a million and one climate change deniers on here.

It’s probably because they are already convinced that Global Warming
is a massive communist-marxist conspiracy invented by evil scientists
(including the Met Office) and the ‘EUSSR’… who are all part of a
baffling conspiracy with no obvious point.

They have no doubt moved on to the next great scourge of the free
market: this so-called ‘gravity’ that the same scientists pretend
exists.

It is why at exactly midday tomorrow, James Delingpole, Lord Monckton
and the entire crew of Fox News are going to ride a giant unicycle off
the edge of the Grand Canyon and PROVE CONCLUSIVELY that they are also
correct about the lies that gravity-believers peddle.

and friend Caerbannog or a cousin points out

Maybe you should ship Delingpole over to our side of the pond.
He’d be a very small minnow in an ocean of American idiocy and would
quickly be lost in the noise.

You Brits would enjoy a statistically significant reduction in idiocy
over there, and we would suffer only a statistically insignificant (and
unnoticeable) increase in idiocy over here.

the national post also ran the story and quoted our good friends McKitrick and Lomborg extensively. my favorite bit:

“It’s like Keynesian economic models in the 1970s that kept predicting high inflation would bring down unemployment,” Prof. McKitrick said. “Eventually they were so far off reality that it was no longer a case of trying to fine tune bits that didn’t fit...had to admit the underlying theory was wrong and start over.”

The Met Office is a trading fund. It pays for itself and returns a dividend to its government owner. It also has a mobile unit operating in war zones advising our forces of one of the most important bits of information needed: meteorological conditions. Such things don't come cheap.

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Eli Rabett

Eli Rabett is a not quite failed professorial techno-bunny, a chair election from retirement, at a wanna be research university that has a lot to be proud of but has swallowed the Kool-Aid. The students are naive but great and the administrators vary day-to-day between homicidal and delusional. His colleagues are smart, but they have a curious inability to see the holes that they dig for themselves. Prof. Rabett is thankful that they occasionally heed his pointing out the implications of the various enthusiasms that rattle around the department and school. Ms. Rabett is thankful that Prof. Rabett occasionally heeds her pointing out that he is nuts.